Rush finally returns to competitive play!

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Published on: 26/03/2018

After over a year’s worth of break from the competitive League of Legends scene, Rush has recently made his return debut game in the final week of the LCK Spring split against Afreeca Freecs. While Rush had originally signed with KT Rolster in December of 2017, Rush remained on the side lines, not playing a single competitive LCK game.

Why is Rush only playing now?

Rush sat on the bench for KT Rolster for two main reasons:

ONE – Rush had taken a fairly long break, doing mostly streaming during this time. This meant he had gotten fairly rusty, a key reason why Rush opted to stop streaming in order to improve and stop decaying. As you know, streamers mostly play to entertain, Rush was no different. With a lack of serious game play for so long, Rush was unfit for competitive play without proper time to recuperate.

TWO – even if Rush recovered to his original prowess, KT Rolster too had another outstanding jungler, Score. Score is one of the top players in the LCK, so it’s no surprise KT Rolster chose him over Rush, a player that still needed more time to settle in. Score had been with KT for six years, benching him, a player with great results definitely isn’t ideal, thus leading to Rush being forced to ‘warm the bench’.

Experience as a pro

The Korean born player, Rush, started his career in late 2014 with Chinese team, LMQ. The team was later rebranded as Team Impulse and moved to NA, which Rush followed immediately. After a year with Team Impulse, with whom he had promising results, Rush was quickly snapped up by Cloud9, a major force in the North American LCS scene.

From there, he spent half a year with Cloud9, switching back and forth between the main Cloud9 competitive League of Legends team, and their sister Cloud9 Challenger team. While C9 placed third in the 2016 NA LCS Spring regular season, they fell hard in the Spring Playoffs, ending up 5th-6th.

Transition out of the competitive scene

During the 2016 NA LCS Summer split, Rush was dropped by Cloud9 in mid-season. As there weren’t many events that followed (besides Worlds), Rush failed to sign with another team.
Rush then turned to streaming on popular streaming website, Twitch. With his experience in the NA LCS, top mechanics and funny / quirky personality, he quickly gained a wide collection of followers and fans alike.

While he was successful as a streamer for around a year, Rush announced in 2017 he would be taking a break from streaming in order to improve his skill. While he did not fully confirm that this break was to ready himself for competitive play, he did leak his intention to get back into the pro scene.